In Twenty Years: A Novel (12 page)

“Oh, come on, Annie. I was just playing around,” she said. “We can’t land a guy worth shit, so I was just teasing.”

Annie scooted back a few inches and tried to laugh, but it came out like an uncomfortable, awkward belch. Later, she would replay the kiss in her mind over and again, wondering if it really happened. It was all so fast, and they were both a little drunk.

“No, no, I know!” she said, waving a hand, unable to meet Lindy’s eyes.

“We have each other,” Lindy said, raising yet another shot. A toast. “To us! That won’t change. I promise.”

Annie raised up a shot of her own, though her fingers were shaking, and they clinked their tiny little glasses and drank, avowing themselves to each other . . . because that’s what best friends do.

After Catherine and Owen’s wedding, Annie stayed in Bea’s spare apartment in New York until she was brave enough to return to her own, sure that Lindy wasn’t there, sure that even if she were, she’d have the strength to face her. Actually, she was never sure of that, and was relieved that she didn’t have to be, because Bea, back in Honduras, but who always knew everything, e-mailed that Lindy had made her way to Nashville.

Annie unlatched the door, the lock clicking, her breath caught in her throat, and didn’t know why she was surprised to find it empty. A hush settled over the apartment, a barrenness without Lindy there. She stood in the doorway for who knew how long, letting this marinate—that Lindy was gone, and if she didn’t want to think about her again, she didn’t have to. She stood on the precipice long enough to convince herself of this. Then she strode to Lindy’s empty bed, flattened herself on her old mattress, and swore that she was going to change. She’d tried this already, of course, at Penn. With the faded accent and the too-orangey highlights and the knockoff clothing that maybe no one could tell wasn’t the real thing. Maybe she needed to try harder to make someone love her, to believe in her the way Owen believed in Catherine—the way that, well, she’d believed in Lindy. Best friends forever?

Fuck that,
she thought, staring up at the cracks in the plaster left behind from a faded water stain. Why was Lindy so hell-bent on pushing people outside of their comfort zones? Well! Consider Annie pushed!

She maxed out her credit card the next day at Bloomingdale’s, and cut off her shoulder-length hair to a modern bob. She tossed her shoulders back when she walked, and tipped her chin high. She got promoted at the PR firm, though when they called her in for the meeting, she was certain she was going to be fired. She got invited to happy hours, though she fretted she was terrible at small talk and occasionally overcompensated with an extra martini (or cosmo or whatever it was that everyone else was drinking that particular month). Sometimes she even went on dates, and was surprised each time a man found her attractive enough to ask. She nabbed a cheap apartment just south of Harlem and ventured out on her own, eating cold soup from a can for dinner in front of the glow of the TV, but she’d done it all the same—done it without Lindy, done it without Colin, without anyone. It should have made her happy, all of this. It didn’t, though. It felt like work; it
was
work. But it was life, and she supposed it was more than she’d thought she’d get back in Texas.

And then Bea died just a few months after that. So suddenly and without warning. The funeral had been their last chance, probably, to make things right, to make a U-turn back to being one another’s people. But they’d squandered that too. Still hopped up on their sensitivities from the wedding debacle, and without Bea there left to mend things, well, it was easy to let things unravel.

Annie mourned her for a good year, sometimes a memory sneaking in on the subway or at the deli or late at night in the stillness of her new apartment, making her catch her breath. Memories of how Bea had insisted on bringing Annie home for Thanksgiving because she knew Annie didn’t have much to celebrate back in Texas; of how Bea made them all choose a costume theme for Halloween (the cast from
Scream
, the characters from
Clueless
) and go as a unit, an ensemble. Sometimes she still picked up her phone to call her, simply out of habit. Sometimes she checked her e-mail, thinking she’d get a whirlwind update from some glamorous, exotic locale that Annie could only read about in thick magazines at her dentist’s office.

But Bea never e-mailed, of course. Annie could never call.

And then Annie met Baxter. And for once, Annie made her peace with Bea’s passing. Not because she wouldn’t have done anything in the world to bring her back, but because now Annie was unburdened, no immediate history to detach herself from. Only her ancient history, and she’d long since figured out how to outrun that. The accent, the frosted hair, the knock-off clothes, the Twinkies, the wolves—there was simply no one left in her circle who knew her from before.

Baxter was a notorious New York bachelor, a trader at Morgan Stanley, a staple on the late-night scene. They met at a post-5K Goldman-sponsored Fun Run, and Annie was two martinis in. Baxter was three deep. He plugged her info into his phone by his fourth, and then e-mailed her, with her standing beside him, asking if she’d like to come home with him.

Annie knew better, so she declined.

She’d read
The Rules
, after all.

Instead, the next night he took her to a tiny hole-in-the-wall in Little Italy, with homemade gnocchi and to-die-for tiramisu, and they talked about all sorts of things that were out of Annie’s league: the opera and weekends in Europe and yachting and childhood country houses. But they weren’t out of Annie’s league anymore, because now she was whoever she wanted to be. Two bottles of pinot and twelve hours later, she woke in his apartment, under six-hundred-thread-count sheets, a note next to the bed saying he’d gone for a run and to stay for the morning. She pulled the sheets high up to her neck and vowed to be the person he thought she was, be the person she really had become now. He didn’t need to know her secrets; she hadn’t asked him about his own.

He proposed quickly, after only four months. They’d flown to Antigua, Annie’s first time out of the country (she never told Baxter), and he knelt on one knee at sunset on the beach. He cried, and then she cried too, and they both vowed to remember that moment forever. They really did love each other once. Even years later, Annie would remember that gasp of a moment and wish she’d photographed it, wish she’d captured it to share with all her friends.

Baxter had been married once before—a quickie at age twenty-three that lasted nine months—so he didn’t want a big to-do. Though Annie secretly dreamed of a write-up in the
New York Times
, she also couldn’t bear the notion of her mother, in an electric-blue taffeta gown from TJ Maxx, mixing with his blue-blood family, and quickly conceded to something smaller, something quieter. Something that didn’t betray her. Annie flew her mom in for a weekend of pleasantries (at Baxter’s insistence), and Annie held her breath for two days straight, so terrified that her mom would embarrass her, give her away, make him stop loving her. But she didn’t. Baxter was nothing but gracious—Annie had to give that to him even now. If he thought any less of her, saw through the veneer she’d constructed, he said not a word.

They married a month later at city hall.

Afterward, she thought about e-mailing Bea to tell her the news. Her old friend would be so thrilled for her. Until she remembered that she couldn’t e-mail her at all.

They took a real honeymoon to Bora Bora—Annie’s second stamp on her passport, and one of the women who was servicing their hut confided to Annie that this was the fertility season, that you couldn’t leave Bora Bora without a baby. Baxter overheard from the patio, emerged from behind the sliding glass door, and said: “Ooh, well, let’s not leave Bora Bora without a baby.”

Annie giggled and agreed, even though Bea, whom she thought of during her lingering walks on the endless beach while gazing up at the impossibly vast, starry sky from the porch of their thatched-roof bungalow, might have told her to
slow down
, that there wasn’t any rush, that a lot had already shifted for Annie (and Baxter) in just a few short months. What was the hurry? (Not that Bea ever slowed down on her own: Annie remembered this as well. But she was wiser about others than about herself, kinder to others than to herself too.)

Three weeks after they jetted back to reality, Baxter was already logging dawn-until-midnight hours at the office, chasing a partnership—having long forgotten about Bora Bora’s fertility season.

And then Annie started puking. She figured it was from the stress of redoing Baxter’s apartment, making it her own; of leaving her job and filling the endless hours with homemade (but disastrous) dinners; of occasionally hearing her former best friend, Lindy Armstrong, on the radio when she flipped the dial.

A week later, she realized it wasn’t stress. She sat with her underwear around her ankles and stared at the test for a good half hour.
How could it be?
she thought.
Only five months ago I was a party of one.

Five months changed everything, though. Annie again thought about Bea—the tops of her legs damp from her fallen tears, and she thought about all the ways her life, and Bea’s life, and all of their lives, could have taken different turns. If she’d slept with Colin freshman year; if Colin hadn’t slept with Lindy at the wedding; if they hadn’t gone to Bora Bora during fertility season; if, in whatever manner she’d died, Bea simply hadn’t.

Then she blew her nose, pulled up her panties, and reapplied her eyeliner and mascara. She was going to be someone’s mother. And she was going to be the best mother this child could ever dream of. There wasn’t any space left for lingering what-ifs. It was time to seal those scars up entirely.

Tonight, in Colin’s old bed, Annie feels her eyelids dropping lower, heavier, willing themselves shut. She wants one more moment like this, though, in case it never happens again, just so she can be sure she didn’t dream it.

Annie rolls to her side and ever-so-softly, as if she almost isn’t there, runs her hand over the span of Colin’s back, winding down the butterfly of his shoulder blades, onto his waist, which cuts like a V into his Scottie boxers.

She tilts herself away because that’s enough, that’s all it can be. Baxter got more than this with his affairs, but she isn’t Baxter.

Then she shuts her eyes for real this time and tries to not consider the what-ifs that she thought she’d buried ten years ago when Gus was born. It’s harder now, though, and frankly, she’s relieved when sleep finally comes.

13

COLIN

Colin sleeps soundly and wakes almost refreshed, relieved not to have dreamed of Bea. He used to all the time after she died. He dreamed of her falling off mountains in Maui, of her melting from acid rain in Bangkok, of plane crashes into the Atlantic, and car wrecks on the streets of London . . . and grim reapers from the world over that he never seemed to shake. They became less frequent after a year or so, but never quite disappeared entirely. They’d find him when he was least prepared, when his conscious mind was certain he was over it, but his subconscious mind wasn’t ready to forget.

Annie is breathing deeply beside him, a spare pillow flung over her head. He smiles because Annie makes him laugh, even all these years later, even though she doesn’t mean to, never meant to. He’s surprised to find himself comforted with her here next to him, like a puzzle piece that fits in unexpectedly.

She was always sweet, Annie. He remembers she was a virgin back then, and how he thought that was sweet too. Not weird like he thought she might think it was. Innocent. Colin hadn’t known that many girls from his high school who were still innocent in college, not that he was complaining. (He had “de-innocented” several of them.) But even at eighteen, he wasn’t such a throbbing hormone that he couldn’t recognize he didn’t want to be the one to screw Annie up. Not that sex would have screwed her up. He didn’t mean it like that. But he wanted to do right by her, treat her differently than maybe he would have someone else: he didn’t want a lifetime with someone—he was
a freshman in college, jeez!
—and he didn’t think sex was anything other than really pretty fucking fun. But he thought she might. She was wide-eyed enough to think it might mean
everything
, and Colin didn’t have everything to give.

So rather than do the thing that a million of his buddies would do—sleep with her anyway—he broke up with her. It wasn’t that hard. He shouldn’t get too much credit. He wasn’t trying to earn accolades for not being the dick who took her virginity and dumped her. Besides, even if he had his doubts and changed his mind, the fire broke out that same night, and that’s when he realized it was
Bea.
Bea. She shared her story—orphan, cancer, broken back, for God’s sake—and it was love. Like the kind that strikes the hapless high school virgin in the movies. A lightning bolt.

He told her a few weeks later: they split a bottle of Absolut in the student lounge, and he got handsy and tried to kiss her, but she pushed him off efficiently, somehow managing not to humiliate him.

“I don’t want a fixer,” she said.

“Who said I’m a fixer?”

“Me. I’m saying it. You’re premed. You want to be a neurosurgeon! I told you my story, and you want to be my prince.” She smiled that crooked smile. “Who said I’m interested in a prince?”

“I would be
such
a good prince, though,” he said. It was the type of line that usually worked.

But she bit back a grin and shook her head, and they settled in as friends, then best friends. That didn’t stop him from loving her, though. Never stopped him. Later, in those last few days they spent together in her apartment, she told him it was also because of Annie: that she simply couldn’t, would never betray Annie. And he started crying then, and she did too, not because of missed opportunities, that they were destined to be soul mates, blah, blah, blah, but because that’s who Bea was: loyal to the end, but correct in her allegiances too. She
should
have chosen Annie back then. He loved her all the more, in that moment, for doing so.

No woman had even come close to Bea since. He didn’t tell the others tonight, didn’t feel like getting into it, but there had been the failed engagement, at least two pregnancy scares, and some less-than-pleasant interactions with an on-call nurse from time to time.

He really thought that Vivian, the last one, would stick. Fucking A,
he proposed
, which is what she said she wanted! But then she was going on and on about how he wasn’t “fully there,” which he didn’t understand because, goddamn it, all he did was be there.
“I’m here! What else do you want from me?”
But Vivian didn’t think he was “there, like, enough.”

“I can just see it in your eyes,” she said before she grabbed her clothes from the top two drawers in his dresser. “You’re not there.”

“I am,” he said, but maybe not forcefully enough.
“I’m fucking there!”

“Here,”
she said, and she pointed to her heart, and frankly, Colin almost laughed. But she was a yoga instructor, and a revered one, and took that sort of shit seriously. “You’re
not
here.”

Maybe he wasn’t. Hell, he didn’t know. He let her slip out of the bedroom and out the door, so he couldn’t have been as
there, here, whatever,
as he thought.

He just didn’t really think he’d be forty and still sleeping around. Didn’t think he wouldn’t have found someone he’d love more than Bea by now.

The actresses he dates bore him. They don’t eat. They don’t read the news.

He’s not so sure he finds being the Boob King of Los Angeles particularly satisfying.

Maybe he’d like a kid someday.

Yes,
Colin thinks.
Maybe I would.

Annie snores softly, muffled underneath the pillow. He rolls onto his back and worries about the lies he told the four of them just yesterday. Thirteen years ago and then again yesterday. He’d like to come clean, relieve his guilt, let them judge him—or ease his burden, if they’re feeling generous. But it’s been so long now, Bea has been dead for so long now, he doesn’t even know where to begin, how to tell them the truth about how she died. Also, he already bears plenty of responsibility for the wedding fiasco; he’d rather not double-down on the blame, the pointed fingers, the culpability. Of course, if he could, he would rewind and retract the stupidity of the wedding, but he can’t. Bea forgave him, and that’s what mattered most.

He groans and pushes himself up on his elbows. He doesn’t want to contemplate any of this: the past and all the ways it still haunts him, or the future and all the ways it hasn’t gone as expected. He really just wants a superstrong cup of coffee and maybe some breakfast to settle his stomach. Something smells good in the kitchen, smells like it used to two decades ago. And like an easily distracted dog, he chases the scent that pleases his immediate senses. So he eases out of bed, then folds the comforter back over Annie, and rises to greet the day.